


you're not alone

by demonicneonfishy



Series: february angst-fest (febuwhump 2021) [10]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman Needs a Hug, Post-Canon, joe and nile bonding is something that can actually be so personal, very very minor but. still present
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29333886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demonicneonfishy/pseuds/demonicneonfishy
Summary: She’d thought she’d come to terms with everything she’d lost, but in that moment it hits her all over again: she can’t go home, can’t ever see her mother or her brother again. Not even once.And she misses them so much it hurts.
Relationships: Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Series: february angst-fest (febuwhump 2021) [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2141784
Comments: 5
Kudos: 63





	you're not alone

**Author's Note:**

> day 10 of febuwhump 2021  
> prompt: "i'm sorry. i didn't know."

Nile wakes up on her mother’s birthday and can’t find the energy to get up.

She’d thought she’d come to terms with everything she’d lost, but in that moment it hits her all over again: she can’t go home, can’t ever see her mother or her brother again. Not even once.

And she misses them so much it hurts.

“Hey, Nile,” Joe says, poking his head through the doorway, “have you seen the…” He trails off as he catches sight of her.

She wipes away her tears and looks up at him. “What’s up?” Her voice is frustratingly shaky.

“Can I come in?” he asks instead of continuing.

“Yeah, sure.” She looks up at the ceiling and blinks a few times.

Joe crosses the room to sit down on the bed beside her.

“You wanna talk about it?” he says softly.

“It’s”- she takes a breath to steady herself - “it’s my mom’s birthday today, and I just…” 

Joe reaches out and pulls her into a hug, and - okay, she needed this. She starts crying again, but Joe doesn’t say anything, just hugs her a little tighter.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay.” She pulls back, wiping at her eyes. “It all just kinda hit me at once, you know?”

“It’s not the sort of thing that goes away overnight. I mean,  _ I  _ still get it sometimes, and I’m almost a millenium old.” He touches her shoulder, lightly. “But it’ll get better, I promise.”

“Andy said she didn’t remember her mom, or her sisters, and I don’t want that to happen to me, but it  _ could _ , and that’s even scarier. I don’t want to forget them.”

Joe thinks for a moment. “Can I show you something? I’ll only be a minute.”

“Of course.”

He smiles at her and stands up, then runs out of the room, calling out in Italian to Nicky, who’s too far away for her to catch his response.

Nile takes a moment to breathe and collect herself before Joe reappears, holding a battered sketchbook. “Found it.”

He sits back down and flips through the yellowed pages. The contents, or what Nile manages to glimpse of them anyway, are mostly Nicky, but Andy and Booker make an appearance too, and occasionally a woman she doesn’t recognise. Quynh, probably.

“Here.” He tilts the book to show her. On the page is a woman’s face, smiling, with kind eyes that are somehow familiar. Then she makes the connection.

“That’s your mom?”

“Yeah.” He smiles down at the page, but it’s tinged with sadness. “Once we figured out we weren’t going to age normally, I started drawing them. To make sure I didn’t forget their faces. I did the same for- for Booker.”

He shows her more sketches - his father, his older brother, his little sister. 

“How old are these?” she asks.

“These, specifically? Less than a century. I draw them again from time to time, just in case.”   
“What were they like? Your family.”

Joe smiles again, tracing the sketched lines of his mother’s face. “My father was a merchant, and he’d tell us stories of all the places he’d been to, all the people he’d met. My mother used to sing us to sleep every single night. My brother was only a year older than me, and we had a tendency to get into trouble.” 

There are tears in his eyes, and it’s Nile’s turn to place a hand on his arm. “It’s okay, you don’t have to.”

“No, it’s good to remember sometimes. We forget things easily, but saying them out loud helps. And we help each other remember things. I’ve forgotten half the lullabies my mother used to sing, but Nicky remembers them all.”

“How?”

“I taught him the tunes oh, hundreds of years ago. Before we were… well. Ask him to play the guitar for you sometime, he’s excellent at it.”

“Really?” She learns new things about these people every day.

“Yeah..” He looks at her. “But you don’t need to hear all that. You wanna tell me about yours?”

“Yeah.” Nile reaches for her phone. It’s not connected to anything anymore, and Andy, surprisingly, had let her keep it. She turns it on and pulls up the picture of her father in his uniform. “That’s my dad. Killed in action.”  _ Like my family thinks I was. _

She shakes the thought away and swipes until she finds the picture of her mother and brother, together on the day she’d graduated.

“Your mom and brother?” Joe asks.

She nods. “Yeah.” 

She hands him the phone, and he holds it almost reverently, examining the picture before handing it back to her.

“When we were kids and we had nightmares,” she begins, “my mom would make us hot chocolate and talk them through with us. Sometimes she’d try to make them seem less scary, sometimes she’d just  _ listen _ . And she always had this way of making everything seem safer, you know? Like as long as she was there, nothing could hurt us.” The memory makes her tear up a little, and Joe slides his arm around her. She leans into it, resting her head on his shoulder. “I just really wish I could see her again. Or speak to her. Or even just hear her voice. I know what Booker said, but…”

“I promise you, it will get easier,” Joe says gently. “And you can always come talk to any of us, okay? No matter what.”

“Thank you,” she says, suddenly a little overwhelmed. “For this. Everything.”

Joe smiles at her. “No problem. Now, I think this calls for special measures. Wait right here.”

He returns a few moments later with a tub of chocolate ice cream and two spoons. The ice cream has a post-it note tacked to the top with a message written in what looks to Nile like Arabic. 

Joe grins victoriously as he hands her a spoon. “I knew Andy had some hidden somewhere. She usually does.”

“What does the note say?”

Joe pulls it off of the lid and reads it. “Yusuf al-Kaysani, do not touch on pain of death.” He frowns. “Why specifically me?”

“Is that… something to worry about?” She doesn’t know Andy well enough to tell if it’s an exaggeration or if she really will murder Joe.

“She doesn’t mean it.” He scrunches up the post-it and tosses it into the trash. “At least, I hope not.”

They spend the rest of the day watching old Disney movies and eating ice-cream. Nicky joins them after a few hours, sitting on her other side. It's exactly what she needed.

When she goes to bed later that night, there’s a sketch of her mom, dad and brother resting on her pillow, another smaller piece of paper with a little smiley face drawn on it next to that. Nile picks up the sketch and traces the lines with the tip of her finger, then sets it down and runs into the kitchen where Joe is standing, leaning against the counter while Nicky washes the dishes from dinner. She barrels into him with enough force to knock him over if he hadn’t been leaning against the counter, throwing her arms around his neck, and then she’s crying all over again.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you so much.”

She feels Joe smile against her hair as he hugs her back. “You’re welcome, little sister.”

And when Nile finally falls asleep, she feels a little lighter. 

**Author's Note:**

> this is a little lighter on the angst but there's still angst! also i may or may not have cried a little while writing the ending  
> -  
> i'm demonicneonfishy on tumblr too if you wanna come say hi!! (or yell at me for the angst)


End file.
